human potential

(Non)-ordinary life

From May, 1970 (the mescaline experience that woke me up to new possibilities), to January, 1987 (the Shirley MacLaine workshop that did the same thing in a very different way) was almost 17 years. Ordinary years? Ordinary life? Yes and no. The externals were much the same as anybody else’s. The internals were another thing.

To list even the highlights of what went on in those years would give an illusory sense of normality. Some highlights of those years,

• 1970-71. My wife and I spent six weeks in Europe, then off to grad school in Iowa City.
• 1971-73. With my new M.A. (which I never used) in hand, we were off to Florida where I would try to write. I wound up becoming a librarian, surely a job made for me, one would think Indeed, my bosses offered to pay my way through graduate school if I would get a master’s in library science., but I had other plans.
• Finally it was time to run for Congress. A primary race, an entry into the world of politics, I didn’t win the primary, but did well enough to attract favorable attention. That fall I wound up working for Bill Hughes, the primary winner who went on to win the election.
• 1975-77. Two years working as his district office manager in my home town. On the night of his re-election, I resigned.
• 1976-80. I joined with two others to found a weekly free-distribution shopper newspaper, providing me opportunity to write columns, but gradually losing money at an impressive rate.
• 1980-83. When the newspaper went south, needing another way to make a living, I passed a statewide test and became a computer programmer (on the job training).
• 1983-86. Moved to Virginia, still as a computer programmer, hoping to be close enough to the A.R.E. (Edgar Cayce’s group) to find something useful to do. A long three years.
• 1986-1989. I became an associate editor for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, for a while functioning quite happily. It was in the first flush of enthusiasm for this return to writing that I attended the Higher Self Seminar.

Of course, braided into all that, personal life as husband and father and homeowner, with all that those roles entail. Throughout it all, I was reading, always, and making repeated attempts to write fiction, that came to nothing.

Those years were suffused with useless worry, always wondering, where was my work? When was I going to find my life? I don’t know that my life was any harder than anybody else’s, but it wasn’t easy. The things that made it hardest were, of course, within myself. But it took a long time to learn that.

What I know now is that my life up to then had been shaped by solitude and longing.

Solitude. I was more of a loner than I realized. I had a hard time making and keeping friends, and rarely had more than a couple at a given time. This, I know. Why this was, I didn’t know. It took until recently for me to realize that mostly, I didn’t let people in. From an early age I had gotten accustomed to the idea that what I thought, said, believed, did, was usually wrong and probably laughable. Naturally, the stranger my ideas got, the less inclined I was to share them. And this, in turn, meant that I was “living in the closet.” I didn’t quite realize it, because I was seeing it from a different point of view, but I was putting forth an “acceptable” façade that was quite different from who I really was. As I said in Muddy Tracks, once I decided to let people see who I was, what I believed, and do so without shame or apologies, it was very much as I imagine it is for gay people who come out of the closet. What a sense of relief! And what a greater level of honesty one can reach.

However, being used to going one’s own way can be a great strength. That, I had. As the Rimpoche said, “If we could not be bought by praise nor defeated by criticism, we would have incredible strength, we would be extraordinarily free.” Well, unfortunately I could be bought by praise, but I was fairly good at ignoring criticism. Still, a life alone among people is a lonely life, probably more so than if one were alone on a desert island.

Longing. Always there was a sense of time being lost. The years passed, and things changed, and I changed, and still I felt, so strongly, that I wasn’t doing my real work, and didn’t even know how to find it. This gnawing sense of being out of place nagged at me year in and year out, and I couldn’t find anything to do about it. As always, I threw myself into whatever it is I was doing, but as always I had to fight the part of me that was saying, “This is all so much lost time and motion.”

This longing was invisible to others (I think) and I never thought to try to explain it, But it is the hidden thread that explains so many things in my life that must otherwise be inexplicable.

• I had a good job, right out of college, as a news reporter – and quit before a year was up, saying I was going to write a novel.
• I got an M.A. from a good school – and did nothing at all with it.
• I bounced down to Florida for two years, “to write a novel” – and produced nothing that could be seen.
• I can for Congress on a shoestring, somehow neglected to quit mid-stream, parlayed the effort into a good job representing our new congressman locally – and quit after two years to start a newspaper.
• I got a steady job as computer programmer in New Jersey – and promptly decided to move to Virginia.

The hidden key to these eccentric decisions? I was looking for something, and didn’t know what it was, or where to find it, or how to find any road that might conceivably lead anywhere toward it. I couldn’t reason my way to it, and I never thought to seek people’s advice.

I know my father was puzzled, and I am sure he despaired at my lack of common sense. But how could I have explained to him what I myself didn’t understand? In 1985, when he died at age 70, I knew immediately that my life was about to change in a major way. (Astrologically, progressed Saturn was conjunct my natal Sun). My life was going to change. But how would it change? I had no clue. I was flying blind.

 

I have come to realize, nobody can possibly tell the true story of his life. How do you put a quart of material into a pint of words? It can’t be done. Life comes at us all at once, and all the time. When we come to try to describe it, we have to look at this or that; first this then that. We try to sketch logical sequences – necessarily – but this is so inadequate. Life is so much more than logic, so much less understandable than sequence. Describing what happened to you, and why, is like playing chess with half the pieces invisible.

Thus, in the past few posts I sketched four major events that followed immediately after college: a job as news reporter, Dave Schlachter’s death and its aftermath, my discovery of Colin Wilson, and an experience with mescaline that opened my eyes to the world. But how much it leaves unsaid!

• Love, marriage, and a honeymoon in New England
• Early married life in Vineland
• Dabbling in local politics in the spring of 1970
• Six weeks in Europe, my first time overseas
• A year in Iowa City (and an M.A. with thesis in nine months)

Each of these themes could easily support a post or three, because each of them had something to do with my development. But do they bear directly on how my life went from whatever it was to whatever it is? Not really. I mention them here only to remind myself, and you, that most of our lives go unexpressed. Not everything we talk about was important. Not everything that was important can be talked about. What’s worse, we don’t always recognize the fact. I certainly didn’t.

For instance, three of the most important people in my life: Henry Thoreau, Carl Jung, Colin Wilson. In 1970, Thoreau had been dead 108 years, and  Jung, 9 years. Colin was very much alive, but it would be another 25 years before we met. At the time, the three were just names to me; yet in many ways they were closer than the people around me.

• Henry Thoreau. It was my wife’s idea to visit Concord, Mass., and Walden Pond. At the time I knew Thoreau’s name, and nothing more. A year later, in graduate school, my thesis supervisor, after hearing my over-ambitious idea about metaphysical thought in American life, suggested first that I look at the recently published journals of Bronson Alcott, then said, almost as an afterthought, that I might look at Thoreau as a  sort of  community of one. Alcott’s journal was huge, and I scarcely looked at it. But I picked up Walden and was immediately entranced. This man and I were on the same wave-length.

I found his journals and examined his thoughts from 1837 to 1847 – that is, from age 20 to age 30 – and wrote my thesis on his early social views in light of his personal religion. (I may post that thesis here at some point.) After I got my M.A. and decided against continuing for a Ph.D.,(what would I do with it?), I thought I would write more about him. (My wife gave me as a splendid birthday gift the two-volume Dover edition of Thoreau’s journals, which remain a prized possession.) An unexpressed theme in my life from 1970 was a continuing process of discovery, book after book, by him and about him, that would lead to Emerson and others. But where would this thread show in the braiding? It wouldn’t, yet it was as real and as important to me as anything external that happened.

• Carl Jung. While my wife and I were traveling in Europe, I bought Modern Man in Search of a Soul, and again, the man spoke to me. I didn’t know anything about psychology. I knew the names: Freud, Jung, Adler, and nothing else. Yet as soon as I began reading Jung, I somehow knew, here was a teacher. As with Thoreau, Jung’s books continued opening doors through the years. Just as, in my mescaline experience, I somehow intuitively knew what I was doing, so I knew what Jung meant, and sensed things (rightly or wrongly) that he didn’t quite say.

Had anyone told me that 36 years later I would experience direct mind-to-mind contact with this great man, I would have scoffed. And when it did happen, it was a little overwhelming. But by then I had spent years, off and on, following in his mental footsteps, book by book. Again, an invisible but crucial part of my day to day existence, even when months or years went by between readings, because of course we become what we take into our minds.

• Colin Wilson. And always there was Colin, expressing in so many genres. I came upon him first in a novel, but then went to The Outsider, which I suppose might be called literary criticism, though it is much more than that. Then, over the years, he poured his abundant intellectual energy into so many different molds: detective stories, science fiction, biography, philosophy, and – mostly – what we might call Examination of Life. If you’ve never read him you won’t know what I mean. If you have, you will recognize why it is impossible to describe the effect his work produces. He is continually saying, “Look at this and this and this. Now, look at them in light of this particular phenomenon,” and you’re off to the races. He makes you think. More, he gives you thing to think about.

Henry Thoreau writes about who we are, how we are to live, what are our possibilities.

So does Carl Jung.

So does Colin Wilson.

Now, imagine a life that is being continually enriched and disturbed by these three invisible wizards, and you’ll get a faint sense of another of the factors that was always nudging me onward. But I doubt if much of it showed. I was always happy enough to talk to anybody who might be interested, but they were few enough. One tires of baring one’s soul and being the recipient of a kindly (almost contemptuous, certainly tolerant) amusement.  One is easily cured of the habit of easy confidences.

But the fire burned within. I didn’t know where, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know what, but I did know that the life I led was unsatisfactory, and its unsatisfactory nature had little to do with social position or prestige or money or any of the things people seemed to value so highly. All I knew was that, whatever I had seen to date was not enough. My reading, my briefly drug-enhanced experience, my inner drive, all told me there was more somewhere, if only I could find it.

 

In 1970, I was living my life exclusively Downstairs. I believed in “supernatural” powers, or wanted to, but I had no access, and no way of gaining access. (Besides—though I didn’t realize it then—my idea of supernatural powers was closer to Superman comics than to the real thing.) I had no guide, no idea where to go or what to do. But my Upstairs component improvised brilliantly as we went along, using whatever became available. It very efficiently used mescaline to teach me several lessons.

My first and only experience with mescaline came within a few weeks of Dave Schlachter’s death. I had come down to D.C. mostly to see Dennis, who had gotten a weekend leave. We both knew that he was going to Vietnam soon, and there was a very real possibility that I’d never see him again. We met at the apartment of one of our younger fraternity brothers who was still in school, along with another senior I knew slightly, and my ex-roommate Bill. One thing led to another; we were offered a chance to try the psychotropic drug mescaline, and we took it.

Dennis and I had gotten through college without trying drugs; our younger contemporaries were somewhat patronizing about our lack of experience. But now Dennis was going to do it and I wanted to stay with him, even though I was somewhat scared of the idea. So we paid our money (all of two dollars in 1970) and swallowed the capsules along with a little orange juice, and waited to see if something would happen.

It did! It woke me up!

Once it kicked in, it instantly and entirely (if temporarily) altered the way I experienced the world, at once magnifying my perception of things and reducing my field of focus. What I looked at, I really saw, for the first time. Until then my attention had been more on abstractions and thoughts and memories than on what was right there in front of me. I was astounded at how much I was missing. It was like the time I picked up the prints from my first roll of color film, and walked down an autumn street really seeing the turning leaves, drunk from sudden awareness of so much color in the world.

I looked at a print of a painting of a boat on the seashore, beached head-on, and suddenly experienced the front half of the boat sticking straight out into the room ahead of the plane of the painting. I realized that the artist was able to paint it that way because he was able to see it that way.

A friend put on some classical music; a flute trilled, and I heard it as a bird singing in a garden, and knew (on no other evidence) that this was what the composer was describing in a language normally all but closed to me. I liked classical music, but this was a revelation.

The walls, I realized, were alive! Literally. What I had been taking for dead matter was somehow alive in a way I couldn’t fathom, but couldn’t doubt. Reality wasn’t what I had thought it was.

I awoke in a different way, too. At one point I looked over at Dennis and started to say something about Dave, and he said thickly, “Don’t!” He explained, “It’ll tear us up, and I don’t want to do that.” For that moment I saw the depth of his feelings;. For that moment, his inner self was real to me.

At one point, as I realized how far above my usual mental routines I had been lifted by the energy set free by the drug, I said, “I’m not going back to that prison!” But one of my younger friends said contemptuously that I had no choice. And of course I didn’t. The drug wore off, and in a few hours I was back in ordinary consciousness.

But everything was different.

I had had a glimpse of what lay beyond. I didn’t know how to get back there, but I knew, now, that my intuitions on reading The Mind Parasites had been correct it, though my understanding had been inadequate. There was more available. Only—how to find it?

Many years later a psychic would see me as a shaman of a tribe in the desert somewhere in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico, “always going off by yourself on vision quests.” And during a course at The Monroe Institute, I had had a vision of myself as a shaman in that same desert. I won’t swear that either vision is accurate, but it would explain something that pleased and puzzled me during that mescaline trip. I always instinctively knew what I was doing. Despite having no intellectual preparation  or experience, I continually “stumbled” into knowings. I was right at home, even while being amazed at myself.

Auras, for instance. As soon as I realized that we live in the middle of an energy sheath, I knew several things without knowing how I knew:

• The energy field would still be there to be sensed when I was no longer influenced by the drug. It wasn’t an illusion.
• As I moved my hands across someone’s aura, I could feel a gentle friction, and I knew that this was what Friedrich Mesmer was doing with his “mesmerizing” passes in the 1700s. He was aligning the energy somehow.
• I brought my hands near the temples of a friend who had not taken the drug, and knew that somehow this would enable or assist telepathic communication between us. (And this was before Star Trek I didn’t get the idea from Spock.)

But drugs were illegal, and therefore unregulated, hence there was no telling what you were going to get. And worse, they wore off. The mescaline trip was a wake-up call, a glimpse, not a permanent gain. What was I to do after the drug wore off?

 

One night late in February 1970, very shortly before I got a call from Dave’s father saying Dave was dying, I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack. (Oddly, for some reason the thought came to me that I might steal it. I still don’t know why that thought came across, unless merely to underline for me the importance of that book.) It was a science-fiction novel called The Mind Parasites, by an author I’d never heard of named Colin Wilson. I bought it, and that was one more moment that turned my life.

The plot was simple enough. Two scientists at the end of the twentieth century (then thirty years in the future) discover that we are all the unsuspecting hosts to creatures that sap our vitality and our sense of purpose. After sundry adventures, the scientists learn to defeat the parasites, and for the first time begin to take possession of humanity’s unsuspected abilities, including a host of powers then usually called occult.

When I read that book, I was seized with the conviction that the author was telling the truth, that we do have such powers, and they are inexplicably beyond our grasp. What is more, it was clear to me that the author believed it too. The strength of his conviction ran like a strong current beneath the surface of the story, and was spelled out clearly in his preface.

In all his works, as I was to learn over the years, the same underlying message comes through. There is something wrong with life. The unsatisfactory way we live isn’t the way it should be or has to be. We possess vast unsuspected powers and abilities of which we are slowly becoming half-aware. It is our task to exert the intelligently directed will to learn to develop and use these powers.

The message came through to me that night, and filled me with excitement. Something within me went click! and said, “This is how it is.” For a while I pressed this book on all my friends, and was disappointed and puzzled that it didn’t turn their lives as it had mine. But it had turned mine because it was the right book for the right person.

I had read Jess Stearn’s Edgar Cayce—the Sleeping Prophet, and Ruth Montgomery’s A Gift of Prophecy, but not much else that could be called parapsychology or occult. My mental world was filled with history, biography, politics, current affairs. After all, I was going to be a statesman!

The only thing in my life touching on the paranormal was the fact that in college I had hypnotized a couple of my fraternity brothers, eliciting stories that purported to be past lives of theirs. As to drugs, George Washington University was a very conservative school, slow to catch up with the times, and I was a very conservative person—and a timid one—who had his future political career to consider. I graduated without having tried any drug stronger than alcohol and tobacco.

But now this book, that would open so many doors by reinforcing a certain mental bent, had come to me by what people thoughtlessly call “coincidence.”

I no longer believe in coincidence. Instead, I see opportunity and choice. Our Upstairs (non-3D) component nudges our lives to make available to us certain possibilities. We in turn (the Downstairs crew in the 3D) choose. We say yes or no, right or left, up or down, and whatever we choose leads to other choices. That is what we are here for, to choose. And, as I see it now, nudging is what was going on when I picked up Colin Wilson’s book that night, shortly before Dave Schlachter’s father called.

 

Dave Schlachter died in his hometown at about 11:20 a.m. on March 2, 1970.

(A phone call saying that David was back in the hospital expected to die that night. A hastily arranged thousand-mile drive that brought three of us to be with him. A couple of days while he hung on. And then, he died. In those last moments, one of us held his mother, another held his girlfriend, and I put cooling cloths on Dave’s head and stroked his forehead, and talked to him and said goodbye.)

The following week, we were in northern New Jersey, where his father had family, and on a bitter cold Friday we buried him, as the rabbi and his father said the ancient words that probably none of Dave’s friends believed in.

While we were standing as pallbearers, Dennis, who had been Dave’s closest friend, leaned over to me and quietly quoted Kahlil Gibran: “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses the understanding.” I had plenty of pain, but not much understanding. (I couldn’t even understand why I had pain. Intellectually, I knew Dave was better off dead than trapped in a malfunctioning body. Intellectually, I believed he was now free. Intellectually, I believed in reincarnation, so intellectually I couldn’t see death as a tragedy, right? This from the same brain that was still lacerated from the murders of JFK and RFK, men it hadn’t even met!)

Dave had been one of my three closest friends in college; in some ways the closest. He and I were instinctively on the same wavelength, even though he was a well-motivated, scholastically successful, solidly middle-class Jewish Midwesterner, and I was none of these.

When he was hospitalized, my reaction was fierce: Fight this thing! Something told me that Will would have more to do with Dave’s survival than anyone was admitting. And I wanted desperately to help. Had the feeling that I could help, if I only knew how. But no one could tell me how. Our mutual friends were defeated by it. I read in their eyes that they thought I was merely refusing to accept the reality that Dave had been given a death sentence.

The worst of it was that I could see that Dave thought so too. In those days, even more than today, the surrounding culture called despair realism. In 1970 the consensus was that his only hopes were medical intervention or spontaneous remission (whatever that was supposed to mean) or a miracle. Medical intervention had failed, spontaneous remission wasn’t happening, and I don’t think anybody in Dave’s hospital room believed in miracles. I did, I suppose, but I sure didn’t know how to summon one.

Two weeks after he died, I was writing this in my journal:

Remembering times with Dave,

Like when he drove me to Solomon’s Island because I was sick with anger.

Like when we watched the inauguration together.

Like riding, talking, till 4 a.m.

Like discussing all the things that need discussing on the way to growing up.

Like sitting in my room choosing the 20 greatest men who ever lived.

Like planning a congressional race.

Like watching kindred minds follow kindred paths.

Like him arguing with me when I was depressed.

Like me arguing with him when he was depressed.

Like talking out all the doubts and half-fears that moulder and paralyze.

And so forth. Dave and I had had that kind of relationship. But he had died, not quite 23 years old, and we who were left had to live; had to figure out how to live.

Our lives read like straightforward narratives, but they live more like braiding. This happens, and then that happens, and then the other happens, seemingly without follow-up, and then something else happens that incorporates them; depends upon them; makes sense of them. We look back and say, “Well sure, it’s obvious.” But it isn’t obvious until after the fact. In the year after I graduated from college, four strands braided together to move me toward a future I could not have imagined.

Looked at thematically, they would seem to have little in common: a walk in a riot zone, an early death, a science-fiction novel, a final gathering of friends. But look how they braided.

1. The news

While in college, I never gave a thought to how I would make a living afterward. I couldn’t imagine a path. Just as well. It would have been a waste of time trying to imagine the path that did open up.

In April, 1968, the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, sparked wild rioting in black neighborhoods in cites all across the country.  The western limit of the riot zone in Washington, D.C. was only a few blocks east  of campus. I was curious. I took a walk past police lines into the riot zone, wrote up my impressions, and sent them to the editor of my hometown newspaper, who printed some of it and sent me a note asking to see me next time I was in town. A year later, I began working for his paper as news reporter.

I was still taking it for granted that I would run for Congress in 1974, at age twenty-eight, though I did nothing to prepare for that far-off day. (That was entirely typical. I was very unworldly.) Meanwhile, I threw myself into becoming a reporter.

At first, it was fun. Being a reporter is a license to kibitz. As low man on the (short) totem pole, naturally I got the most routine, unexciting assignments: hospital admissions, police blotter, night court. But it was a change from sitting in class taking notes – not to mention quite a change from working in a factory or (as in college) working at a grocery store. And gradually other things came up. I never got what you could call training, but I stumbled along, and, as I say, it was interesting.

We were an afternoon paper, which means we put it to bed midday, which meant we had all morning (starting at 7:30 a.m.) to write our stories. And since I was living in my parents’ house, and for the first two months was unmarried, often I would return to the newsroom after night court and sit and talk to Al Wallitsch. Al seemed pretty old to me, but I suppose he was in fifties. He had seen and done a lot, and read a lot (he was a particular fan of Thomas Wolfe and Ben Hecht). He was a real reporter in a way I would never be, but he seemed to like shooting the bull with me That part was fun. But it didn’t take long before disillusionment set in.

Strike one. I wasn’t there long before I got thrown out of the police chief’s office. In my defense, I was innocent, sort of. We had heard on our police scanner that a couple of cops had gotten into a shoving match with three or four black kids. Nothing major, but not the first such incident. My editor told me to see if I could find out if we were building up to a race riot. So I combed through the incident reports at the station and didn’t see anything about it. When I asked the desk sergeant, he went through an elaborate search through the flimsies and said I had everything.

So I asked the police chief, and he said everything is fine, no incidents, no information on anything happening overnight. I could see the canary feathers sticking out of his complacent lying mouth, so I said, “What about the four black kids that put a crack in the windshield of car 308 Tuesday night. That didn’t happen either?”

Ralphie shouted, “Get out of here.” (A la Steven Leacock: “Shut up,” he explained.)

By the time I got back to the newsroom, Ralphie had already talked to both editor and publisher, and they had agreed to kill the story. I was hot. I asked if we were going to put up with letting the police lie to us and kill the story. My editor said, “Ralphie’s been police chief a hell of a lot longer than you’ve been a reporter.” In retrospect, he had a point, but at the time all I could see was the silent censorship.

Strike two. The paper sent me to cover a press conference with the president of the new four-year state college they were setting up in Atlantic County. I went there thinking of myself as a rookie next to these Philadelphia-area professionals. But every single one of them asked variants of the same question: “Is the college going to concentrate on offering a relevant education?” That was the buzzword of the time, relevance. I was the only one who asked other things: What kind of students were they looking for, what did they intend the school to specialize in, what kind of special needs and opportunities did they see in the South Jersey area. These media professionals never considered asking anything beyond the universal topic du jour. I had been thinking about becoming a real journalist, because after all, I was good with words. But did I want to become like them?

Strike three. And then there was the question of favoritism, something everybody else knew about from the cradle, but that I in my innocence didn’t consider. I was reporting night court, and six kids were getting charged with possession of marijuana. One of them was a kid I had known in school, but I when I wrote down the names for the police report, it never occurred to me to leave his name off the list. It wouldn’t have been ethical. But the next day, my roundup piece included his name, but not that of one of the others. Turns out that boy’s family and the publisher’s family were close friends. From that moment, I learned how to read the news in a different way. It became clear how some stories got slanted and some were smothered. It stank, and there was nothing I was ever going to be able to do about it.

I could still do the job, more or less, but the thrill was gone.